What Gordon Should Have Written
by MomochiNaruto
Summary: This is a rewrite of Commissioner Gordon's appallingly stupid speech about Harvey Dent, a speech that would have robbed Bane of much of the impetus for his plans. Oneshot.


What Gordon Should Have Written

Disclaimer: I don't own Batman or Gary Oldman

"The truth… the truth is that I've been carrying around a secret burden for these last 8 years. A burden that I've spoken of with no one. And as heavy as the burden got, I was comfortable carrying it, knowing that it was better for me to suffer in silence than to allow others to have to bear the burden, because the price I might have to pay for letting down my burden would be paid for with innocent lives.

"But now, I weary, and yet I hope. The burden has grown very heavy indeed, and it has become all the harder to bear. But with so much work done, I can see hope that the price of setting it down will no longer be so high, that my long labor carrying it has paid some of the price.

"And my burden? My burden is a lie, one I've been telling for 8 years.

"And the truth… the truth is that the Batman didn't murder Harvey Dent."

Gasps of shock and outrage from the audience.

"The Batman did NOT murder Harvey Dent. I know, because I was there.

"The truth is that whatever his public persona, Harvey Dent pushed himself harder and took on more burdens than a human can possibly bear when he was prosecuting the mafia. His work was impeccable, and his sense of justice unparalleled. If Harvey had any real flaws, it was his unrealistic expectations of other people.

"The truth is that I found out much later that he had proposed to his assistant, Rachel Dawes, the night the Joker first appeared in public, and at the time of her death had been patiently waiting for her answer. An answer he only got to hear just before she was murdered.

"The truth is that following Mr. Lau's escape from arrest, Harvey Dent, the Batman and I conspired to return him illegally to Gotham for prosecution.

"The truth is… that the night we caught the Joker for the first time, the night following Harvey's bluff that he was the Batman, he and Miss Dawes never made it home. They were kidnapped, by crooked cops no less, and taken to distant abandoned warehouses where they would be murdered.

"During the interrogation, the Joker refused to speak to me; he enjoyed the pain that my imaginations of Dent's suffering caused too much.

"So the truth is that I did something highly illegal, but also something I'm proud of: I left the interrogation room, and I allowed the Batman to interrogate the Joker.

"The police are expressly forbidden to use violence to extract a confession, and under my watch no policeman has done so. But the Batman has no such limitations; his conduct is already illegal. So the truth is that I am guilty of police brutality.

"The violence unleashed by the Batman, however, was not enough to break the Joker. Instead, he told us willingly what we wanted to hear; his plan all along wasn't to break the police or Harvey Dent, it was to break… the Batman.

"Harvey Dent believed that the Batman took up his suit and his weapons and the burden of vigilantism because the situation was so dire, and that the Batman lived for the day when he could afford to take his suit off permanently. Harvey also believed that the Batman believed that he, Harvey Dent, was the one who could replace him as the guardian of justice in Gotham. This belief of Harvey's is one I share; the Batman's anguish that night, at the thought of Dent and Miss Dawes paying for his actions, was palpable.

"Yes, for those who are unaware, I had regular contact with the Batman while he was active in his vigilantism. More than once I actively helped him to evade arrest. So I am also guilty of aiding and abetting a fugitive.

"I have never seen his face, and I have never expended much effort trying to find out who he was, even in the years since his disappearance. As much as he trusted me, and I him, the possibility that I might be forced one day to pursue him genuinely was very real, and it was something the Batman was unwilling to risk.

"The truth is that when the Joker revealed their locations to us, he lied. Where he told us Dent was being held, Miss Dawes was there, and where he told us Dawes was held, Dent was there. What's more, he told us that we would only be able to save one of them. That much was true. The Batman, apparently believing that we would rescue Dent, took off to save Miss Dawes.

"The truth is that I never gave any thought to sacrificing Dent to save Dawes. It would have been a tragedy, but one I could live with, if we could save him at the cost of her life; it **was** a tragedy, when this turned out to be the case.

"The truth is that had the Joker told the truth about who was where, Harvey Dent would have died that night. Instead, the Batman saved his life, and Miss Dawes died instead.

"During his rescue, Harvey Dent's face became partially covered by the diesel fuel from the explosives meant to kill him, and when the bombs were detonated that fuel caught fire, severely burning one half of his face.

"This is why his funeral was closed-casket.

"When the Joker announced his intention to destroy a hospital, we evacuated Gotham General, believing it to be his primary target, as it turned out to be. But one of the buses that we were using to evacuate the patients was captured by the Joker's men, to be used in a terrorist plot later.

"Harvey Dent was NOT on that bus.

"To this day, I do not know what the Joker said to Harvey. I don't want to know. But I do know that they did speak while Harvey was still confined to his hospital bed, and I also know that Harvey Dent left Gotham General under his own power.

"What I also know is what Harvey Dent did next.

"Detective Robert Wuertz was the crooked cop who delivered Harvey into the Joker's hands. Harvey successfully tracked him down and killed him. You notice, of course, that I refuse to call Dent's actions murder. A prosecutor and a court might, but I won't.

"Harvey then managed to track down Salvatore Maroni, and I believe that he did this to find out which crooked cop delivered Miss Dawes to the Joker's men. Harvey killed him, and his driver as well.

"Detective Anna Ramirez was the other cop Harvey sought, and it was through her suicide note that we were able to discern what was going through Harvey's mind at this point. She was NOT, incidentally, killed by Dent, or murdered at all in fact. Her suicide was what it appeared to be.

"Harvey had been willing to die so that Miss Dawes might live; only, when the Batman entered the warehouse he was being held in, that choice was no longer his. It had been made for him. And the team I was leading failed to reach Miss Dawes in time. In the rubble where Miss Dawes died, we found Harvey's lucky two-headed coin, and I believe this was returned to him by the Batman.

"This coin became his obsession. For him, the coin toss became the ultimate expression of justice, because it was, in his mind, _fair_. Everyone involved in the coin toss had an equal chance.

"That this is not a proper conception of justice at all is obvious and unquestionable. But it also serves to prove the extent to which Harvey Dent lost his grip on reality following the kidnapping.

"He believed that everyone who was involved in the attempted murder of himself, and the successful murder of Miss Dawes, had to face the judgment of his coin toss. The Joker, apparently, survived the coin toss. Salvatore Maroni, his driver, and Detective Wuertz weren't so lucky.

"The Batman saved Harvey's life; he didn't fail that night. But I did. And by my failure, Harvey's love was taken from him, as the result of the proverbial coin toss. So in his madness, he believed that I needed to face the same nightmare.

"Harvey kidnapped my family, my wife and children. And he subjected my son to his coin toss in front of me.

"The Batman saved my son's life, and in the process Harvey Dent was killed.

"I will forever be grateful to the Batman for saving my son's life. But it is the rest of Gotham who needs to be grateful to him for what he did next.

"Because you see, the truth is that my lie wasn't my own.

"The Batman understood what Harvey's later madness might do to all of the work we had done while Harvey was sane. So he agreed to take the blame for Harvey's actions, and in so doing sealed the fates of those Mafioso whom Harvey had prosecuted.

"He willingly plunged his clean hands into the filth, so that mine and Dent's could remain clean. He did it knowing what it would do to his reputation. He did it knowing that he would have to hang up his suit and end his crusade, lest he be killed by police officers who wrongly but understandably believed that the Batman had murdered Gotham's _real_ hero. And I think he did it gladly.

"The Batman was the hero we deserved, but he wasn't the one we needed right then. We needed what Harvey Dent had been, and in order to have that what he became had to be suppressed. One way or another, Harvey Dent would become the symbol the Batman no longer needed to be.

"The Batman had the strength to make that choice. To my shame, I did not. Had the Batman never suggested it, I would simply have faced the consequences of Harvey's madness, and the war would have continued.

"And it _was_ a war we were fighting. Sometimes in war you have to choose between bad and worse. The Batman chose, sacrificing himself for the sake of the ideal for which he had been fighting. Recognizing what he was doing, I helped.

"I can't begin to tell you how hard it has been, praising the madman who tried to murder my son, knowing that only days before hand I would have willingly trusted my son into his care. And I can't do it any longer.

"I don't blame Harvey for what he became. And I don't blame the Joker either. Nor do I blame the mafia.

"I blame those city fathers long past who allowed our standards of justice and moral conduct to lapse. I blame those who, in the name of "social justice", thrust wedges into this nation of laws and split those laws open, leaving us with a nation of men instead.

"I blame those who preached that barbarians were not to be punished and ostracized, but instead to be tolerated, understood, and treated humanely, instead of like the animals they are.

"I blame those who took justice for the innocent and traded it for mercy to the guilty, leaving the rest of us and our future generations to deal with the consequences. It was they, after all, that allowed things to get so bad.

"And so today the truth is that while I can no longer publicly praise Harvey Dent, my support for the Dent act is as strong as ever.

"And the truth is that, having knowingly and deliberately broken the law multiple times in my capacity as Police Commissioner, I hereby tender my resignation, and submit myself to whatever judgment the people of Gotham feel I am worthy of.

"Thank you."


End file.
